2009/1/27 Tom Brown <brown@esteem.com>

Hey guys,

I've been using gentoo on my desktop for several months now. I works
great. It cut five minutes off my build time when I build our product
tree. It went from 20 to 15 minutes.

I setup our email server using Debian. Its been solid as a rock and very
low maintenance. However, it provides an antiquated environment.

I'm looking at using gentoo for the email so I'll have an up-to-date
system. Peformance is fine on the Debian system, but hey, faster is
always better.

I was hoping you guys could give me warm fuzzies about stability and
maintenance with gentoo when it comes to a production server.

What about major upgrades? If I keep the system updated regularly, is a
major upgrade necessary?

Thanks!
Tom

If your planning on running a stable server then managing a gentoo server is probably a bit more time intensive, but will pay of in terms of having it configured how *you* want and with the services *you* want running, not what someone else thinks you should have.

As a rule of thumb dont run ~ARCH unless you absolutely need a certain package (and even then, stick to keyword specific versions rather than blindly keywording everything). Dont feel that you need to sync and update every day, but *do* use tools like glsa-check (i think thats the right one but im not in my gentoo isntall to check atm) to ensure you update programs where security bugs are known.

Also its worth keeping an eye on things like the forums, and planet as often when updates to packages are likely to break things, or they need some manual intervention when updating, you see some signs of this in advance (although if you see a major update in your emerge list you *should* be stopping and going off to read up on it before blindly emerging).

Of course, all these things wont stop you causing breakages, but if you work cautiously and have some idea of what your doing then gentoo does work very well as a server.

- Nick